Was a Man or a Woman the First Author to Sign a Text ?

Reading and writing in both hypermedia and cuneiform can be described in terms of metaphors used by women writers since before the turn of the second millennium BCE.

As we spring and leap and scroll along from image to thought to sight to sound on the world wide web, we leap from one idea to another, tying and untying, twisting and untwisting threads of understanding. This is the use of allusion, the employment of the "leap" to annex one poetic experience to another. It is visible in the works of poets who read their work aloud, and poets who publish their words in the hard-inked pages of a book. It is this very use of allusion that is at the core of every poem. It is this allusive dance which gives the poem its energy and its density, regardless of whether the poet fixes a metaphor into paper with pigment, embeds a reference in clay, or floats it electronically in hyperspace.

This is also an activity that women have practiced since at least 4,000 years ago, when the first writer to claim authorship pushed the cuneiform signs into soft Mesopotamian clay.

That writer's name was Enheduanna and she composed the first signed text in history, nin-me-ùsar-ra, a song to the female deity Inanna. Enheduanna wrote her hymnal verse by combining Sumerian pictographic signs which carry multiple meanings, creating a work which can be read with all the ambiguity that poetry demands.